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Despite numerous references to Asherah worship in the Bible, there wasn't enough evidence to link her explicitly with the high god of ancient Israel, Yahweh. Until, that is, the discovery of a remarkable ceramic inscription in the Sinai desert. Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk...
The inscription was photographed and recorded by archaeologists and scholars of ancient Israelite religion, so we know what it looked like - and importantly - what it said. Dating to about the 8th Century BC, it was found at a remote site called Kuntillet 'Ajrud, and was written on a large piece of a broken pottery. Its writer was probably a traveller or a merchant, moving between the towns of ancient Israel. For any traveller, a journey was dangerous, so divine protection was important. The inscription is a petition for a blessing. Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from 'Yahweh and his Asherah'. Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife. Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk...
Jer 7:18 The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.
Jer 44:18 But since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.
Jer 44:21 The incense that ye burned in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, ye, and your fathers, your kings, and your princes, and the people of the land, did not the LORD remember them, and came it not into his mind? Jer 44:22 So that the LORD could no longer bear, because of the evil of your doings, and because of the abominations which ye have committed; therefore is your land a desolation, and an astonishment, and a curse, without an inhabitant, as at this day. Jer 44:23 Because ye have burned incense, and because ye have sinned against the LORD, and have not obeyed the voice of the LORD, nor walked in his law, nor in his statutes, nor in his testimonies; therefore this evil is happened unto you, as at this day.
Originally posted by Tinman67
Doesn't the creation story refer to the making of man in "our" image??? This would clarify that plural usage.
Interesting stuff. What else have we forgotten?
If all Israel sprang from the loins of Abraham, then even the heterogeneous collection of people left in Judah could look back in their imagination beyond a loose confederation of twelve tribes to a single progenitor, and pride themselves on a purity of race unmatched in the whole of Palestine. They were a single family, chosen by their god whilst wandering in the desert, and brought together into the Promised Land. Above all, they were different from their Palestinian neighbours. Their god was not Ba'al, and those features of their traditional religion like sacred prostitution, prostration before the erect phallic images of the Asherah, worship of the mother goddess Ashtoreth, and dedication of human semen at the mouth of the vaginal passage to the earth's womb, the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem, had all to be banished, no matter how reluctantly.
Asherah, Asherah, detail from an ivory box from Mīnat al-Bayḍāʾ near Ras Shamra … [Credit: Giraudon/Art Resource, New York]ancient West Semitic goddess, consort of the supreme god. Her principal epithet was probably “She Who Walks on the Sea.” She was occasionally called Elath (Elat), “the Goddess,” and may have also been called Qudshu, “Holiness.” According to texts from Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria), Asherah’s consort was El, and by him she was the mother of 70 gods. As mother goddess she was widely worshiped throughout Syria and Palestine, although she was frequently paired with Baal, who often took the place of El; as Baal’s consort, Asherah was usually given the name Baalat. Inscriptions from two locations in southern Palestine seem to indicate that she was also worshiped as the consort of Yahweh. The word asherah in the Old Testament was used not only in reference to the goddess herself but also to a wooden cult object associated with her worship.
Asherah was represented by large phallic symbols (mistranslated as "trees" or "groves" in some early versions of the Bible); Asherah "poles" crop up several times in the Old Testament, usually when Yahweh is ordering their destruction.